Japanese are Robust Against Loneliness

I am currently reading Prof. Cacioppo’s book, “Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection“, and so far, the basic theme is that loneliness or lack of social contact can be fairly debilitating to one’s health. Human beings and pretty much all species evolved through its basic history to generally fear being alone since it is advantageous to work in social constructs. The current estimate is that half of loneliness is dictated by genes; the genes can especially influence your vulnerability to loneliness, while cultural and environmental factors have a bigger influence in dictating how you prevent and cope with loneliness. High loneliness tends to degrade social cognition (ability to understand other peoples’ feelings and to “read” the current social occasion) and executive control of your feelings. The book is fairly heavy on neurobiology with not much emphasis on culture; we already know that loneliness correlates negatively with life satisfaction; therefore, with the rising hikikomori population (or at least the diagnosis), I became interested in how high the loneliness is in Japan.

The feeling of loneliness (as with other feelings), defined as “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved level of social contact,” is difficult to interpret through different cultural lenses. Like in Cacioppo’s book, not only there are genetic differences and differences in their biological reactions for each individual when facing loneliness, there are differences in how people translate these feelings outward. If one uses the UCLA loneliness scale as a measure to quantify feelings of loneliness, the answer to the question, “How often do you feel completely alone?,” may differ because of heterogeneous assumptions in what is considered a “social contact” in Japan (or Finland or Germany or wherever). The United States, statistically, has the most friends per capita of any country, but they might have a slighter lower threshold of “friend,” resulting in a positive bias.

In Japan, or generally collectivist cultures, one could hypothesize that with the prevalence of highly structured social organizations, loneliness may not be much of a factor; conversely, idiocentric societies (like the U.S.) may promote loneliness due to a stronger preference for independence, competition and hedonism. Furthermore, collectivist cultures may increase loneliness with a lower sense of self especially if the fit and adaptation to the ingroup suffers; even within the ingroup, people in collectivist cultures may not feel as connected with their colleagues because relative to idiocentric cultures, it doesn’t require as much effort to fit in. Generally speaking, as societies become more complex (i.e. more industrialized), there exists more of these social organizations with lower barriers of entry and exit, and people become more independent (Triandis et al. 1988) — Japan is not an exception (one metric is to look at number of NGOs).

There are several indicators that Japan has higher levels of loneliness (all refs included in Schumaker et al. 1993):

1. excessive adaptation to the social environment can inhibit autonomy
2. Japanese undergraduates have higher levels of neuroticism
3. loneliness and life satisfaction is inversely related
4. low job satisfaction of employees
5. job satisfaction can be positively correlated with occupational self-direction and control
6. Japanese undergraduates are conforming, reserved, introverted, non-disclosing and more self-conscious, all factors lead to loneliness
7. low levels of religious belief and community involvement

As far as I know, there isn’t a convenient “loneliness indicator” that one can extract from an online database (aside from patches of research). But there is tons of research that shows loneliness is positively correlated with heart diseases. Even controlling for diet, weight and other physical attributes, increased rates of loneliness lead to developing heart diseases. Loneliness also leads to increased drinking, eating, smoking and less exercise, factors that all have negative effects to your heart. But in addition, what loneliness does is produce higher levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress. Cortisol is actually used to protect from an incoming heart attack. But loneliness forces people to emit cortisol perpetually, so the body can’t distinguish the warning from a heart attack to loneliness. Loneliness is different from depression in that loneliness makes you try to get away from solitude, whereas depression makes you apathetic. The former requires more effort and can contribute to more wear and tear.

This is shown in a cross-cultural look at heart disease rates. The figure to the right shows heart disease rates for different cultures (Triandis et al. 1988). We see that even with people of the same race (Caucasian), growing up in different cultural backgrounds can have a huge effect on heart disease rates, and theoretically, loneliness. This set of data doesn’t control for diet so it may not be the perfect indicator for loneliness. Marmott and Syme (1976) actually did control for diet and body attributes to conclude that Japanese in Japan have significantly lower heart disease rates than Japanese Americans (although they didn’t control for Omega-3 intake, another predictor for heart diseases). The significant difference between Japanese and Japanese Americans is derived from “culture” but not necessary loneliness.

So both heart disease rates and happiness are both correlated with loneliness. So I decided to look at some data on heart disease rates versus levels of happiness. In theory, higher happiness should be relate well with lower heart disease rates. Happiness is also a proxy for “how good do you feel about yourself,” whereas heart disease rates is a proxy for “actual consequences from how you felt.” I used happiness data from OECD’s recent data and heart rate data from the WHO.

Take any happiness indicator, and you see that Japan has low heart rates relative to their well-being. Several inferences can be tentatively deemed from this:

1. even with low happiness, Japan is robust against effects on health (Japan still has the highest life expectancy)
2. it’s hard to detect Japan’s happiness (or loneliness) just from these data (Japan hiding feelings may underbias happiness stats)
3. all wealthy countries have low heart rates, Japan is just really unhappy for whatever reason; and wealth is largely related to happiness up to a point (Frey and Stutzer 2002)
4. loneliness is not a factor, but something else is depressing the happiness; therefore, this graph isn’t informative for studying loneliness
5. sushi is good for you
6. it may advantageous to have a loneliness personality

From a loneliness perspective, high loneliness (=> low happiness) hasn’t translated to debilitating effects on health (=> low heart disease rates). Of course this assumes these correlations are correct and longitudinal studies are required to look at this issue more carefully. Schumaker et al. (1993) has done a clinical study on Japanese and Australians to conclude that Japanese have higher loneliness (relative to Australians) but loneliness doesn’t correlated as strongly with happiness for the Japanese. So we might say that high loneliness isn’t the main factor that is affecting health (aside from high suicide rates!).

Refs:

1. Marmott M. and Syme S. L. 1976. ACCULTURATION AND CORONARY HEART DISEASE IN JAPANESE-AMERICANS. American Journal of Epidemiology Vol. 104, No. 3: 225-247.
2. Triandis, Harry C.; Bontempo, Robert; Villareal, Marcelo J.; Asai, Masaaki; Lucca, Nydia. Individualism and collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives on self-ingroup relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 54(2), Feb 1988, 323-338.
3. Schumaker JF, Shea JD, Monfries MM, Groth-Marnat G.J Psychol. Loneliness and life satisfaction in Japan and Australia. 1993 Jan;127(1):65-71.
4. Bruno S. Frey, Alois Stutzer. Happiness and economics: how the economy and institutions affect well-being. Princeton University Press, 2002.

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